Getting to know Cheryl Lynn Bruce

Lauren R. Harrison, TRIBUNE REPORTERCHICAGO TRIBUNE

She's worked with Tony-Award winning director Frank Galati and was part of the Jeff Award-winning "From the Mississippi Delta," which got off-Broadway backing from Oprah Winfrey. Theater colleagues have described her as "passionate," "fiercely intelligent," and above all, "Chicago royalty."

Actress Cheryl Lynn Bruce can check off a laundry list of accomplishments in film, TV and stage, but on a recent Tuesday afternoon while working on "The Old Settler," the first all-black production at Glencoe's prestigious Writers' Theatre, she became a singer.

During a lull in rehearsal for the John Henry Redwood play, the Ink Spots' "If I Didn't Care" starts to trickle from some speakers. "I love this song!" exclaims Bruce, belting out buttery vocals.

"If I didn't care more than words can say, If I didn't care would I feel this way?"

She sings. All the while putting on lipstick -- not the first time the acclaimed actress and director has juggled more than one seemingly disparate endeavor.

Bruce, dressed elegantly in all black save for her in-your-face gray hair, is also an avid gardener of jasmine, hibiscus and geraniums ("They're just like people"). While traveling around the country, dazzling audiences and critics, she finds time to leave a garden update on her home answering machine, which friends have come to look forward to. Bruce is also part of a black arts power couple with her husband, famed artist Kerry James Marshall.

"Cheryl Lynn Bruce is one of my favorite people in the world," says Dennis Zacek, artistic director of Victory Gardens Theater, where she played Barbara Jordan in "Voice of Good Hope" and the narrator in "Snow Queen." "Not only is she extremely proficient as an actor and singer, she also has a heart and above all a soul. I think she inhabits every character with her own humanity, which is palpable."

The road to such recognition was neither straight nor narrow, particularly for a black actress in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Born and raised on the South Side, Bruce caught on to acting at St. Columbanus Catholic Elementary School, where every year each classroom studied dance routines and then put on a performance.

Although her parents thought she would become a doctor, Bruce frequented her high school's stage. After two years of premed in college, she changed course, going on to earn a bachelor's in theater at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But getting work wasn't easy.

"She went out for industrial work, out in a trade show. They were looking for actors, and she was supposed to be an astronaut," says Joan McCarty-Sanchez, a friend for more than 40 years. "Then they called her and they were apologetic. She clearly was the best person that they had seen all day, but the sponsor did not think they should hire a black astronaut."

According to Sanchez, instead of being "a crybaby about it," Bruce thought, "What can I do next?"

Later, after the dissolution of a marriage and with a young daughter, Bruce snagged her first paying role, in "Death and the King's Horseman." Curious about why actors were brought to the production from New York, Bruce asked a castmate, who told her that they were "professional actors because they're in a union."

"What's a union?" she said.

After briefly learning about Actors' Equity Association, Bruce was determined to get a union contract so she could be viewed as "a professional" actress. When she received a union contract to work in a production at the Kennedy Center, Bruce was jubilant but didn't know that it meant increased compensation, benefits or dues.

Upon returning to Chicago, Bruce found herself in a peculiar situation: "Now I have this union card. I'm paying dues and I can't work. I can't work at the black theaters (that weren't union-affiliated), and the white theaters aren't hiring."

Instead of wallowing, she left for New York with $500 and her belongings in a Volkswagen Bug and cried "all the way through Indiana."

A few years later, Bruce was working at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she met someone else who arrived in a Volkswagen: Marshall, who was to begin an art residency there.

(His success -- a permanent collection in the Art Institute of Chicago's Modern Wing, a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award, two invitations to Germany's highly prestigious Documenta show -- is well-known.)

"I thought she was really attractive; had a really buoyant personality and was not like a lot of people or women even I had met," says Marshall, sitting in his cluttered South Side art studio.

After they had been a couple for some time, in 1987 Marshall blurted out a marriage proposal as Bruce went through a turnstile at Union Station.

"I have no idea what came over me," he says, chuckling. "Marriage was the furthest thing from my mind."

After going back through the turnstile, Bruce told him she would have to think about it. In spite of her non-answer, Marshall returned with her to Chicago to care for family and they later married.

Partnering with the Goodman Theatre in 1994, Bruce devoted her summers to a Youth Drama Workshop for 10- to 15-year-old residents of the Chicago Housing Authority's Dearborn Homes. The weekslong exposure to art, dance, music and culture culminated in a public performance that Bruce directed.

"I find that I'm most challenged when a performance is being crafted," she says. "I tell young actors when I teach that they shouldn't be chess pieces. They're thinking and collaborating."

Kind of like her "deep involvement" in the controversial choice to have a white female character give breast milk to a black starving father on the brink of death at the end of Galati's "Grapes of Wrath," he said.

"I think in a way we became brother and sister in the crucible of that story, because she kind of took me by the hand and asked me to consider the meaning of this action in terms of the drama," Galati says.

Drama isn't the only place where Bruce finds meaning. Like many actors, she has certain theater neuroses.

She wears a Moroccan charm of silver and carnelian around her neck if the costume conceals it, and if it doesn't, she wears it in an unseen place. "I've worn it for over 20 years now. So I feel naked without it," Bruce says.

She does not read reviews while her shows are going on and doesn't want to know who's in the audience to see her.

"I don't even like people to say, 'I'm coming to see you on Thursday.' La-la-la-la, I can't hear you!" she says as she sticks her fingers in both ears. "I don't want to know."

That's especially possible in the intimate setting of Writers' Theatre, with about four rows flanking each of the stage's three sides. "The Old Settler," directed by Ron OJ Parson, thrusts audience members into the living room and kitchen of two older black sisters living together in 1940s Harlem.

The bonds of their sisterhood are tested when a man from the country becomes a boarder on a search for his fiancee but finds an unlikely love.

Parson says he cast Bruce in the production because she "gives depth of character."

"She knows a lot about life," he says. "A lot of times when we're working in these types of plays -- naturalistic African-American culture -- we try to use sense memory to tap into our own experiences with our own families and own ancestors."

Bruce easily "sensed" the connection to her fraternal grandmother, two great aunts and great grandmother who all lived in a two-floor apartment together for much of her childhood. "There were no men in that house," Bruce says. "They had a yard, a garden, flowers, vegetables ... and I would see them arguing. Living together. Working. Caring for that house."

This play will be the first all-black production at the Writers' Theatre. Why now?

The play is "not a hammering away at a specific civil rights issue," but "more that it's delving into the human condition, consequently, I think my audience will be drawn into the tales of these two women, seduced almost, and they'll find themselves identifying with them effortlessly," Halberstam says.

Yet as afternoon lurches into night, the real effortlessness is in the way Bruce deals with questions -- like what people would find most surprising about her.

"That I'm still learning, that I don't know everything," says the actress. "That every production is an adventure and that if I don't learn something, I've wasted my time."